Paper short abstract:

Bruno Gwelo’s ‘Mayibuye’ about researchers engaged in Robben Island cultural heritage deals with (over-)identification understood as housing in former prison actors’ lives. The paper focuses on (pan)optical sight lines and method acting as examples of caminar instead of taken-for-granted caminos.

Paper long abstract:

'Mayibuye' is an unpublished study-cum-story by Bruno Gwelo about a research training group engaged in biographical in-depth studies of former Robben Island prisoners and guards. Located at Cape Town’s UWC campus, the task of the PhD candidates is to appropriate and re-enact the lives of selected eye-witnesses in preparation of a new guided tour to the island.

The text resonates to the panel topic and description in quite a few ways, e.g., when the prison’s conventional panoptical setup comes to be repeated in the visual axis between Robben Island and the city, disciplining both prisoners and Cape Town citizens. The 'oseaanopticon', as it is called, is less an optical-and-concrete surveillance-pathway – no hay camino – but something to be performed, yearned for by the prisoners and feared by the mainland citizens, to be eye-walked: hay que caminar.

The deliberate (over-)identification of the PhD students with the actors of former Maximum Prison stands for another subliminal, non-verbal and body-affecting, abstract path to be taken: that to be(com)ing guest in a hosting person's more or less welcoming and comfy life. The group’s mode of pursuing knowledge is method acting à la Stanislavski: ‘method’ combining ‘meta’ for development and ‘hodos’ for way, instancing once again the need to caminar, not a given and taken-for-granted camino.

Onesmus, Rachel, Joey, Gayatri, Bruno and ‘Ons Suster’ each appropriate their role models in a necessarily individual way, leading to alienation between themselves and varying degrees of indifference when one the group disappears on, literally, her oseeanopticon path.